Last week I enjoyed interviewing an old friend of mine, Tish Harrison Warren, for our church podcast. I wanted to talk to her about her new book What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience. But I didn’t want it be just a book interview- I wanted to invite Tish into conversation with some of the themes we’ve been exploring this summer at Third Church about “resilient joy” — the title we’ve been using for our study on the book of Philippians.

One of the great refrains of Tish’s book is “stay in your cell.” This is a mantra borrowed from the Desert Fathers and Mothers which was employed as an exhortation to encourage a long fidelity to a particular vocation and calling. It’s a way of of saying: don’t always be wondering if you might find greater fulfillment in another location or community or relationship or job — to “stay in your cell” means to stay put long enough within your current commitments that you are able to find the goodness and meaning in the life you actually have.

This is a wonderful, absolutely necessary commitment for a resilient life, but I really appreciated the turn our conversation took. Tish admitted that this call to “stay in your cell” is necessary but not sufficient. If this was the end of our teaching on Christian resilience, then we are offering little more than a baptized form of stoicism, a “grin and bear it” approach to the challenges of life. We need more than stability — we need hope.

Hope enables us to stay in our cell while looking beyond it. Hope enables us to radically accept the truth of our current circumstances while also trusting that our current circumstances are not the end of the story. And Christian hope, specifically the hope of the resurrection, dares us to believe that we can actually participate, right here and now in our little cells, in the future renewal of all things.

“Therefore…” Paul writes, after expounding the truth of Jesus’ resurrection for an entire chapter. “Therefore…. let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58).

Stay in your cell. Keep your commitments. Don’t keep looking for the life you wish you had and miss the goodness in the life that is actually yours. But keep one eye open to the coming Day of Christ, and participate now, in every day works of love, in the great renewal that is coming.

Hope you’ll listen to our whole conversation. It was great!

At the very end of the gathering, it’s become tradition to all stand in one enormous circle around the room, holding hands while someone offers a closing prayer. It’s always moving. Hundreds of people, different races, traditions, personalities, ages, all praying to the same Lord.

But this year, something struck me that I had never really considered before. What moved me wasn’t just what we held in common. It was all the things we didn’t.

Standing in that circle were women pastors holding hands with people who believe women should not be pastors. There were Pentecostals praying in tongues, standing beside people who believe speaking in tongues is theologically suspect. There were Christians fully affirming of LGBTQ+ inclusion standing beside Christians with a traditional sexual ethic. Democrats. Republicans. Charismatics. Presbyterians. Baptists. Episcopalians.

And somehow, for that moment at least, we all agreed that what united us in Christ was greater than what divided us.

Experiences like that feel increasingly rare. Not just in society, but in the church.

As I argued in my previous essay on the “Deep Center,” communities can only sustain this kind of difference if they are deeply rooted in something more fundamental than ideological agreement. When the roots go deep enough, the branches can stretch wide.

At For Richmond, we’ve* tried to organize around the historic center of the Christian faith: the life, death, resurrection, and Lordship of Jesus Christ. Ten years ago, that would not have sounded especially controversial. Today, it increasingly does.

Because in our polarized age, many of us have quietly begun moving secondary things into the center. Political instincts. Social analysis. Ethical conclusions. Cultural markers. Increasingly, Christians on both the Left and the Right seem uncomfortable remaining in meaningful fellowship with those who do not share their convictions on every important issue.

But a center that cannot hold difference is not actually a strong center at all.

The New Testament envisions a church that is both deeply rooted and radically generous.

In Romans 14–15, Paul addresses a major conflict threatening to tear up the Roman church. The disagreement appears to involve food sacrificed to idols, as well as the observance of sacred days. These were not trivial matters. The debates touched worship, holiness, ethics, and obedience to God.

And yet Paul does something fascinating. He does not demand total agreement between the disagreeing parties. Instead, he writes: “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God” (Romans 15:7).

That word “acceptance” matters. Paul says accept, not agree. Not endorse. Not affirm every conclusion. Acceptance is deeper and harder than ideological uniformity. It means receiving one another as brothers and sisters even amid unresolved disagreement.

That’s uncomfortable for many of us. We would often prefer clarity to tension. Uniformity to complexity. Tribes to tables.

But Christian community has always required people to remain at the table with those who frustrate them.

Marriage teaches us this. Any healthy marriage eventually discovers that love is not the elimination of difference but learning how to live with difference generously. You stop trying to turn the other person into yourself. You learn how to remain connected without demanding sameness.

The church is no different. A deep center makes possible a generous center: a community where people can hold strong convictions, wrestle honestly with difficult questions, and still remain bound together by the love of Christ.

That doesn’t mean “anything goes.” Paul clearly believed there were boundaries to Christian faithfulness. But it does mean that when it comes to disputable matters, Christians are called to practice humility, patience, and mutual honor rather than immediate separation.

And frankly, in our current moment, that kind of community feels almost miraculous.

And perhaps that is exactly what the church is meant to be: a kind of miracle of sociology. Not a community where everyone thinks the same thing about every issue, votes the same way, or arrives at identical conclusions on every difficult question. But a community so rooted in Christ that it can hold disagreement without fracture, conviction without contempt, and difference without fear.

In a society increasingly sorted into ideological silos, even the simple act of remaining at the table together becomes a form of witness.

The early church astonished the Roman world not because Christians agreed about everything, but because people who otherwise would never have belonged to one another somehow became family. Jews and Gentiles. Slave and free. Rich and poor. Men and women. Zealots and tax collectors. The church was not held together by natural affinity but by the reconciling love of Christ.

That kind of generosity still has the power to astonish. And honestly, I think many people are starving for it. Beneath all the noise of our moment, I suspect many people are longing for communities where they can tell the truth, talk openly about disagreements, wrestle honestly, grow slowly, and still be loved.

The generous center does not eliminate disagreement. It simply refuses to let disagreement become the final word.

* full disclosure: I serve on the board of For Richmond.

There are some obvious answers of course. He’s a brilliant song writer and lyricist. He blends folk sincerity with pop memorability. He is refreshingly modest, funny, and unpolished in an age of relentless curation, especially in mainstream music.

But I think it’s also more than that. When I read the hundreds of comments under the YouTube videos of his concerts, it’s clear that he has found a language for a generation who carry a sadness that is difficult to name.

It’s not a dramatic, howling kind of sadness. It’s more like the sadness of loneliness in a crowded room. The omnipresence of anxiety beneath outward competence. The confusion of freedom without direction. The grief of growing up and leaving home and never being able to get back. As one comment stated under one his recent videos:

Lately I noticed that everybody seems okay until you eventually have a deep conversation with them. Then you realize that we are a sad generation of people struggling to survive through smiling faces and pretty pictures.

My hunch is that many younger listeners hear in Kahan’s songs what they struggle to say for themselves: I’m grateful for a lot, I’m connected to so many people, but deep within something still really hurts.

And Kahan has the capacity to name it in a way that deeply connects.

Homesick for More Than a Place

A recurring theme in Kahan’s music is home – especially the complicated relationship that so many people have with the place and people they came from. His songs often capture the strange emotional tension of wanting to leave your hometown, only to discover that once you leave, part of you still belongs there. And even if you return, you can’t return as the person you once were.

That theme lands because many people today are homesick for more than geography.

They are homesick for rootedness. They miss neighborhoods where people knew one another. They miss communities not built entirely around convenience. They miss friendships that were not scheduled weeks in advance. They miss institutions they can trust. They miss a sense of place in a world increasingly lived online.

In that sense, modern longing is not nostalgia for some perfect past. It is a desire for thicker forms of belonging.

Singing Sadness Together

There is another fascinating dimension to Kahan’s appeal that I keep hearing about: his concerts often feel like communal catharsis.

I’ve tried to get tickets to his upcoming tour, and it’s virtually impossible to find anything that’s affordable. But when you watch a concert online or talk to someone who’s been to one, you see thousands of people singing lyrics about mental health, family wounds, insecurity, addiction, shame, loneliness, and hope.

As a pastor, I admit this makes me stop and wonder. Historically, communities of faith often gave people language for sorrow. The Psalms taught us how to grieve, protest, confess, lament, and hope. Worship gave people a place to bring heartbreak into community rather than carrying it alone.

But as those institutions have weakened for many, and frankly, as many younger people have become disillusioned with the church, people still seek what humans have always needed: honest language for pain and companions with whom to carry it. And sometimes they now find that in a concert venue.

I don’t say that critically. I say it sympathetically and with an eye of critique toward the church. When thousands of young people sing their sadness together, it should make Christians wonder why so many people in the younger generations do not find the church a safe place to express their deepest hopes and fears.

Learning the Soundtrack

It would be easy for older generations to dismiss younger people as overly sensitive, perpetually anxious, or captured by a victim mentality. I really think that’s a mistake. Better to listen to the songs they are singing with curiosity and love.

If millions resonate with songs of longing, longing is likely one of the defining spiritual realities of our time.

If they sing about home, many probably feel displaced.

If they gather to lament and sing of their sorrow, perhaps they are searching for places where sorrow can be spoken aloud.

And if that is true, then churches, families, and communities should pay attention. Because beneath the irony, the self-protection, and the mindless scrolling, many still want what human beings have always wanted: To be known. To belong. To grieve honestly. To hope meaningfully. To find a way home.

That may be the deepest reason Noah Kahan resonates. For some at least, he is singing the soundtrack of modern longing. And we should listen.

It didn’t seem right to deposit such a gift unreflectively into our bank account, letting it to be swallowed up anonymously into our daily expense fund. My wife Sarah and I talked about a symbolic way we might use the money to honor “Uncle John’s” mark of grace on both of our lives. We very quickly settled on our decision: an SLR camera with a really nice telephoto lens (this was way before iphone cameras were what they are today!).

Many people remember John Stott for his books and preaching, but fewer remember him for his love of creation, his ornithological passion, and his knack for bird photography. On the very first day of my job working as his study assistant, I found on my desk a brand new set of binoculars and a copy of “Birds of Europe,” by Lars Johnson (“The definitive guide,” John said). No study assistant was to work for John unless we shared in his love for birds, or at least could ably feign it.

I soon discovered how seriously he took this avocation. In London he would stop whatever meeting we might be rushing off to in order to catch a look at a passing Kestrel. At his writing cottage in Southwest Wales we would begin every Sunday morning at Pickleridge Pools to see the Loons and Cormorants. Wherever we traveled, whether Uganda, India or Hungary, we would always schedule an extra few days to visit the local bird life with the accompaniment of a local expert.

But I also discovered that his love for birds was an extension of his love for creation and for its Creator. Uncle John took seriously the Psalmist’s words, “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them” (Ps 111:2). Taking “the works of the Lord” to include both God’s work of creation and redemption, he would often say that nature study and Bible study must go hand in hand. He was ahead of his time in calling Christians to have a more robust doctrine of and appreciation for Creation, and he viewed having at least one pursuit in the realm of natural history as an outflow of Christian discipleship. Indeed, it is striking that in his very last book, The Radical Disciple, in which he reflects on “some neglected aspects of our calling,” he includes “Creation Care” among Christian responsibilities like Christlikeness and Dependence. And as remarkable as his accomplishments were in authoring such influential books as Basic Christianity and The Cross of Christ, it was his much less well known book The Birds Our Teachers, which includes over 150 of his own photographs, that he would most often pull out to show visiting guests.

Some criticized John for his theistic evolutionary position and even his appreciation for Darwin, who John viewed as a man genuinely conflicted with how his discoveries could be integrated with his personal Christian faith. But Stott saw no contradiction between his own commitment to the authority of Scripture and his openness to God’s use of evolution in His creative process. He was of course unequivocal in his assertion that “One cannot be a Christian and not believe in creation.” Yet believing that Genesis 1 speaks more to the “why” rather than the “how” of creation, John also affirmed, “Those Christians who believe in evolution…mean that the huge variety of animal and vegetable forms can best be accounted for not by the independent creation of each, but by a gradual process of ‘descent with modification’, whether or not Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ is the best explanation of its mechanisms.” If anything, for John the possibility of God’s implementation of the evolutionary process was a striking example of the way God does not simply create but is also actively involved in sustaining and ordering His world.

So on the date of Uncle John’s birthday, April 27, we used his gift and bought our new camera. Laying it out on the table, I realized I needed a spacious and protective carrying case to hold the various lenses and equipment. I climbed up into the attic and retrieved Uncle John’s old camera bag, which he passed on to me after he had his second embolism and could no longer see well enough to take photographs. As I opened it up and examined the various lenses and mounts inside, now too old to adapt to any of the modern equipment, I realized I was holding in my hands the tools of one man’s passion and an expression of his love for his triune creator God. Deeply moved, I picked up my own camera, a new tool for my own stewardship of created life, and headed outside.

Over the next several weeks, I want to explore five dimensions of this vision:

• The Deep Center – rooting ourselves in the essentials of the Christian faith

• The Generous Center – making space for disagreement without division

• The Mediating Center – cultivating a less-anxious presence in conflict

• The Contemplative Center – abiding deeply in the life of God

• The Cruciform Center – embracing the cost of staying centered

We begin with the foundation: the Deep Center.

A Tree That Can Withstand the Storm

Recently, I had an arborist come to our home to look at a massive pine tree in our backyard. It towers over our house. It’s beautiful, but also a little unsettling. I found myself wondering what might happen if it ever fell.

After examining it, the arborist reassured me that the tree was healthy. As I commented on its extraordinary height, he remarked, “The only way it can sustain that kind of height is with incredibly deep roots.”

His comment reminded me of my friend Tom Greggs, who often uses an image of deeply rooted tree to describe what is needed in our current theological moment. A tree cannot sustain wide-reaching branches without deep roots. If the roots are shallow, the tree becomes fragile, vulnerable to every strong wind. But when the roots go deep, the branches can stretch wide, offering shade, shelter, and life.

This raises a question for us: What would it mean for the American church to become a deeply rooted, widely branching tree again?

The Temptation of Shallow Roots

We are living in a moment of profound fragmentation. As our society has become more divided, the church has followed along. In many ways, the American church has mirrored the culture’s dynamics, especially in how we define who is “in” and who is “out.”

On both the Right and the Left, there has been a subtle shift toward expanding the center of the Christian faith to include more and more things. Political affiliations. Cultural positions. Secondary doctrinal interpretations. Social and ethical conclusions.

What emerges is a kind of doctrinal and ideological maximalism, a thickening of the boundary lines around our communities.

And the result is predictable: The more we add to the center, the more people we exclude. The more we demand uniformity, the more fragile our communities become.

Rediscovering the Center

What if the problem is not that our faith is too small, but that our center has become too crowded?

For most of Christian history, the church has had a remarkably simple answer to the question: What is at the center? The answer is found in the creeds: specifically, the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.

The Creeds are not exhaustive theological systems. They are not position papers on every ethical issue. They are not partisan manifestos. They are, quite simply, a shared confession of the essential story:

• God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth

• Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human, crucified and risen

• The Holy Spirit, present and active in the life of the church, bringing all things toward the New Creation.

These creeds do not say everything, but they say enough. They provide a theological center that is both deep and durable, one that is capable of holding the church together across cultures, centuries, and disagreements.

Or, to put it simply: The historic creeds are sufficient to hold the center.

Bounded Sets and Centered Sets

Sociologists sometimes describe communities in two different ways: bounded sets and centered sets.

A bounded set defines itself by its boundaries. The key question is: Who is inside and who is outside? Like a fenced pasture, the goal is to keep everyone in within clearly defined lines.

A centered set, by contrast, is organized around a center. The key question is: What are we moving toward? It’s less like a fence and more like a well, something life-giving that people continually return to.

Both models have their place. But in a complex, pluralistic world, the centered-set imagination offers something really important. It allows for movement and growth, real difference within a shared identity, and a focus on direction rather than a defined location.

In the language of faith, it asks not only “Do you agree with me on everything?” but “Are we oriented toward Christ together?”

Essentials and Non-Essentials

This is where the wisdom of my mentor John Stott has been so helpful. Stott insisted that the church must learn to distinguish between:

• Essentials: the core truths of the gospel

• Non-essentials (adiaphora) : matters on which faithful Christians may disagree

This distinction is not always easy, and it is obviously complicated from age to age. It requires humility, discernment, and ongoing conversation. But without this differentiation, something dangerous happens: We begin to treat non-essentials as essentials. And when that happens, we don’t get a stronger faith, we get a more brittle one. We get a faith that can’t bear disagreement, communities that fracture under pressure, and churches that confuse uniformity with unity.

Why the Deep Center Matters

Holding to a deep center, rooted in the essentials of the faith, creates at least two vital possibilities.

1// It Creates Space for Real Difference

When the center is clear and grounded, the branches can stretch wide. People can wrestle with complex and difficult issues. Communities can hold disagreement without immediate division. Conversations can become places of discernment rather than battlefields.

We’ll explore this more in the next essay on the Generous Center. But it begins with theological clarity about what is essential.

2// It Clarifies What Must Be Resisted

The deep center is not only about what we affirm, it is also about what we resist. Every generation faces the temptation to distort the gospel by fusing it with something else, by bringing something other than our confession of Jesus Christ into the center.

In our time, two distortions seem especially powerful:

• On one hand, the temptation to fuse Christian faith with national or ideological power

• On the other, the temptation to imagine human flourishing apart from God.

In moments like these, the church must return to its center and learn to speak clearly and even prophetically.

One of the most powerful examples of this is the Barmen Declaration in 1930s Germany, where Christian leaders resisted the attempt to merge the gospel with nationalist ideology. They did not create something new. They simply returned to the center: to the Lordship of Christ, and in doing so, they exposed the idolatry of their time.

This is what a deep center does. It gives us the clarity and courage to say: This belongs. That does not.

A Courageous Simplicity

It requires courage to live this way. It is not the courage of the loudest voice or the strongest opinion. It is the quieter, deeper courage of refusing to add to what God has already made central.

In a world that constantly pressures us to expand the list, to take sides, to draw sharper lines, and to prove our allegiances, the deep center invites us into something both simpler and harder: to root ourselves again in the essentials and to trust that they are enough.

An Invitation

What might it look like for your faith, your church, or your Christian community to become more deeply rooted? Where have you felt the pressure to add to the center? Where have secondary things begun to carry primary weight? Where might God be inviting you to return to the essentials? What might need to be resisted?

The health of the tree depends on the depth of its roots. And in an age of storm and strain, the church does not need wider boundaries nearly as much as it needs deeper roots.

I am so grateful to be a guest on Mark Labberton’s podcast Conversing. Mark and I both served as Study Assistants to the late Rev. Dr. John Stott, and Mark has become an important mentor to me over the last 20 years.

In this podcast, we discuss bridging divided communities and the spiritual practices that can sustain pastors as they serve their congregations and communities. We talk about pressures facing pastors in a polarized era, the prophet-priest-king calling, Richmond’s racial history, pastoral burnout, John Stott’s legacy, and the contemplative life.

🌐 Episode Page
🟣 Apple Podcasts
🔴 Youtube

I remember staring at my screen for a long time, unsure whether to laugh or cry. At the time, I took the emails as a kind of failure. I had tried so hard to carefully navigate through the extremes, and somehow, I had managed to disappoint everyone.

But over time, I’ve come to see that moment differently. It now feels like a window into the peculiar challenge of our moment, a challenge not just for Christians leaders but for every person of faith. The challenge is attempting to live and lead from what I have come to call the radical center.

A Moment That Pushes Us to the Edges

We are living in a time that resists the possibility of a center. The pressures around us, cultural, political, even ecclesial, consistently push us toward the edges. We are encouraged, subtly and overtly, to locate ourselves within clearly defined camps, to adopt the language and instincts of a tribe, and to view those outside our circle with suspicion or even contempt.

This is not only true in the wider culture. It is increasingly true within the church. Over the past two decades of pastoral ministry, I have watched communities fracture under the weight of these pressures. I have seen how quickly complex questions become simplified into slogans, how easily disagreement turns into division, and how often our shared identity in Christ becomes secondary to our alignment with one side or another.

And yet, in the midst of all of this, I have come to believe that the most faithful response to this moment is not to retreat from the tensions, nor to resolve them by choosing a side, but to learn how to inhabit them differently. In an age of extremes, what if the truly radical act is not to move further toward the edge, but to remain deeply centered?

What I Mean by “The Radical Center”

When I speak of the Radical Center, I am not describing a safe or comfortable middle ground. This is not the “mushy middle,” where convictions are softened in the name of civility, or where truth is negotiated into something more palatable. It is not a strategy of moderation, nor an attempt to split the difference between competing viewpoints.

If anything, the center I am describing is more demanding than either edge.

The center requires a clarity about what is most essential, and a willingness to resist what is not. The center is a way of being rooted in the historic faith of the church— grounded in the creeds, shaped by the Scriptures, and oriented around the person and ethic of Jesus—while also cultivating a posture of generosity, humility, and openness toward others. The center, in this sense, is not defined by compromise but by conviction. But it is a particular kind of conviction: one that is anchored in what is most central to the gospel, and therefore able to hold secondary matters with a certain spaciousness.

At the same time, to inhabit this center also requires a clear-eyed resistance to the idolatries of our age. On the one hand, it means resisting the temptation to fuse Christian faith with national identity or political power— to baptize our preferred ideologies and call them the gospel. On the other hand, it means resisting the equally powerful temptation to imagine human flourishing apart from God— to construct visions of justice, identity, or meaning that are untethered from the Creator in whose image we are made.

To remain centered, then, is not to avoid conflict. It is to be drawn into a deeper one: the ongoing work of discerning where the gospel calls us to stand firm, and where it calls us to make space.

Rooted and Wide

My friend Tom Greggs often uses the metaphor of a tree to describe this posture. A healthy tree has deep roots and wide branches. If the roots are shallow, the tree cannot sustain breadth—it becomes fragile, shaken, and easily toppled. But when the roots go deep, the branches can stretch wide, creating space, shelter, and life.

When our theological grounding is shallow, we tend to become anxious and reactive. We feel the need to secure our identity by tightening boundaries, by controlling outcomes, by maximalizing our theological orthodoxies, or by distancing ourselves from those who think differently.

But when our identity is anchored more deeply— when we know who we are in Christ, and what lies at the heart of the gospel— we are less threatened by difference. We are able to listen more carefully, to speak more patiently, and to remain present in conversations that do not resolve quickly.

Theological depth makes relational breadth possible. The deeper we are rooted in the central truths of the Christian faith, the more freedom we have to be generous in areas that are more complex, ambiguous, or contested.

This kind of rootedness does not eliminate disagreement. It does, however, create the possibility of a different kind of community— one that can hold tension without fracturing, and engage complexity without losing its center. In a culture of outrage, that kind of community is not weak, it is profoundly countercultural.

The Cost of the Center

It’s important to say that this way of being is not without cost. To resist the pull of the tribes is, in many cases, to be misunderstood by them. If you do not fully align yourself with one side, you may find that both sides question your integrity. Your motives may be misread. Your convictions may be flattened or caricatured. At times, you may feel the quiet loneliness of not quite belonging anywhere.

I have experienced this in small ways and in more significant ones, and I suspect that many who are trying to navigate this space have as well. And yet, I have come to believe that this experience, difficult as it is, is not incidental to the life of faith. It is, in many ways, deeply aligned with it.

To remain in the center, in the way I am describing it, is to take up a posture that is, at its heart, cruciform. It is to remain present in places of tension, to absorb misunderstanding without immediately returning it, and to hold together truth and love in ways that are often costly. This is not a technique. It is a form of discipleship.

Leadership in a Reactive Age

If this is true, then it has particular implications for those of us who are called to lead. In a highly reactive environment, it is easy to assume that what people need most from leaders is greater clarity, stronger statements, or more decisive action. And there are certainly moments that call for those things. In fact, this particular moment often demands it.

But increasingly, I am convinced that what people need most is something both simpler and harder to cultivate: a grounded, steady presence that is able to hold immense tension. A presence that is not easily swept up into the anxiety of the moment. A presence that can remain connected to others without being defined by their reactivity. A presence that is rooted deeply enough in God to engage the world without fear.

This kind of leadership does not emerge from strategy alone. It grows out of a life that is being formed, through prayer, silence, reflection, community, and the daily practice of returning to our deep groundedness in our union with God in Christ.

Why I’m Writing

This Substack is, in many ways, an attempt to think and write from that place. I want to create a space where we can reflect on the cultural moment we are inhabiting, not with quick takes or easy answers, but with a deeper kind of attentiveness.

At times, that will mean engaging specific issues in our world. At other times, it will mean exploring practices that help cultivate a more rooted and less reactive inner life. Often, it will involve wrestling with questions that do not admit of simple resolution.

But underneath it all is a shared concern: What does it look like to live and lead from a deep and generous center in a divided and fragmented age?

I do not write as someone who has mastered this. In many ways, this project grows out of my own awareness of how easily I am pulled away from the center, and how quickly I can become reactive, defensive, or anxious.

But I am convinced that there is another way, and I want to live and lead in that way. We are not destined to mirror the fragmentation of the world around us. There is a form of life, rooted in Christ, that is marked by clarity without rigidity, conviction without hostility, and above all, love.

That there is, in fact, a center that can hold. And that, in this moment, learning how to inhabit that center may be one of the most faithful and most needed tasks.

But I also think this Sunday gives us an opportunity, and perhaps an obligation, to ask a harder question: Where did our ethic of life actually come from? And just as importantly, what has shaped it most deeply—Scripture and theology, or our political affiliations?

When it comes to ethics, many of us answer moral questions far too quickly by locating ourselves on a political spectrum. If you deeply identify with one of the major political parties, you don’t just inherit a platform—you inherit what ethicist James Mumford calls moral package deals. Certain positions come pre-bundled and are reinforced by constant contrast with “the other side.”

Pro-guns, pro-life, pro-God versus Pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-immigration

These bundles are rarely examined. They’re simply received, assumed, and defended. And over time, they begin to feel not only reasonable but inevitable. To question any one piece of the package can feel like a betrayal of the whole.

But the Kingdom of God has never mapped neatly onto our ideological taxonomies.

One striking counterexample to this kind of moral sorting can be found in the life and witness of Pope Francis. I am not Roman Catholic, and I have real disagreements with Catholic theology and ecclesial structure. Still, I deeply admired Pope Francis for what can only be described as a radically consistent ethic of life.

Some labeled him “liberal” because of his views on climate change, his sharp critiques of unfettered capitalism and global markets, his opposition to nuclear proliferation and the death penalty, and his unapologetic advocacy for immigrants and refugees. Others labeled him “conservative” because of his strong pro-life stance on abortion, his opposition to euthanasia, and his traditional sexual ethics.

The problem, of course, is that those labels don’t really work. He’s difficult to categorize because his moral vision does not originate in modern political ideology. It flows from a theological anthropology— a coherent vision of what it means to be human and what it means for human life to flourish under God.

In the Catholic moral tradition, ethics are not assembled issue by issue based on political expediency. They emerge from a unified vision of human dignity grounded in creation, incarnation, and resurrection. Within that framework, concern for the unborn and concern for the planet are not competing priorities. They are morally connected. Care for the poor, opposition to the death penalty, hospitality toward migrants, protection of the disabled, and reverence for life in the womb all arise from the same theological soil.

You don’t have to agree with every conclusion Francis reached to recognize the integrity of the moral framework he worked from. His views on climate change, for example, were not an ideological concession to the Left. They were a natural extension of a moral vision that insists human flourishing cannot be separated from the health of the world we inhabit.

This is where our political affiliations often fail us. Political ideologies make for very poor moral compasses. They reward consistency within the tribe, not coherence across a theological vision. And when we allow those ideologies to shape our moral imaginations, we are not being discerning. We are being outsourced.

Once we begin to notice the internal contradictions within both liberal and conservative moral packages, something important happens. We grow less confident in our reflexive answers. We become slower, more thoughtful, and more committed to doing the harder work of moral discernment. Instead of asking, “What does my side believe about this?” we begin to ask, “How does this fit within a faithful vision of life under God?”

That is wisdom

On the recent Sanctity of Life Sunday at our church, we intentionally tried to embody this radically consistent ethic of life in our public prayers of the people. Rather than narrowing our concern, we sought to widen it. Rather than isolating one issue, we named many. Here is the prayer we offered together:

Holy Spirit, giver of life,
on this Sanctity of Life Sunday,
we pray for the protection of all vulnerable life in our world.

We pray for the protection of the unborn
and for the compassionate care of mothers.

We pray for children born into adverse circumstances
and for the people who care for them.

We pray for the protection of the immigrant and the refugee,
that they would find hospitality and refuge from chaos.

We pray for the protection of the elderly,
that they would know the dignity of human touch.

We pray for the protection of racial and ethnic minorities,
especially those who have been historically oppressed and marginalized in our land.

We pray for the protection of the disabled,
that they would know their indispensable place in community.

May your church be known as a people
who stand for all of life
and who protect the image of God in every person.

Lord, hear our prayer.

My hope is not that Christians would simply expand their list of “issues,” but that we would recover a deeper, more coherent moral imagination, one shaped less by party platforms and more by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The world does not need a church that mirrors its ideological divisions. It needs a church whose witness to life is unmistakably, stubbornly, and beautifully whole.

It’s a fair question. Many have tried to answer it from sociological, political, or historical perspectives, and those accounts are often illuminating. I’m not a sociologist or a political historian. But I am a pastor and theologian, and I want to offer a theological diagnosis. Because at its core, this story is not primarily about politics. It’s about idolatry.

In his new book The Vanishing Church, social scientist Ryan Burge notes that as recently as the 1970s, white evangelicals were a politically diverse group. They were not yet a reliable voting bloc. That changed dramatically in the 1980s with the rise of the Christian Right and the Moral Majority. Over a relatively short period of time, “evangelical” became almost synonymous with “Republican.”

This shift did not come out of nowhere. Many evangelicals were genuinely alarmed by what they perceived as a growing secular liberalism in America’s elite institutions : universities, media, courts, and cultural gatekeepers. The broader cultural turn toward expressive individualism, moral relativism, and a thinning understanding of truth felt like a direct threat to historic Christian convictions. And in many ways, those concerns were not imaginary.

A vision of the human person detached from God, untethered from moral limits, and accountable only to the self is corrosive. A materialist secularism that treats religion as a private inconvenience rather than a public good does deform our common life. These were real idols, especially the idol of the autonomous self, and they deserved to be named and resisted.

But here is where things began to go wrong.

In resisting the idol of secular liberalism, white evangelicals slowly but decisively embraced a different idol: the belief that political power is the primary means by which the church secures its future and protects what matters most.

At first, the bargain seemed modest. We wanted political leaders who broadly shared our moral values. But as fear intensified – fear of cultural marginalization, fear of losing influence, fear of becoming strangers in our own land– the terms changed. Character became negotiable. Virtue became optional. What mattered most was strength, dominance, and the ability to “fight back.”

In other words, we moved from asking, Is this leader formed by Christian virtue? to asking, Will this leader protect us?

That shift is the theological turning point.

Once protection becomes the highest good, almost anything can be justified. Language hardens. Enemies are dehumanized. Power is admired for its own sake. Accountability is dismissed as weakness. Over time, the church does not merely tolerate these values: it absorbs them. We end up catechized not by the Sermon on the Mount, but by the logic of retribution, domination, and fear.

We resisted one idol, and in the process, we embraced another.

The result is the precarious moment we now inhabit. In seeking safety through political power, we handed over our moral agency. And in doing so, we allowed a set of profoundly anti-Christian habits to take root among us: contempt for enemies, the normalization of cruelty, a casual relationship with truth, and an impatience with accountability or restraint. These are not unfortunate side effects. They are the predictable fruits of idolatry.

So what now?

The church is not called to be chaplain to any political order, left or right. We are called to be a missionary community: a people whose deepest allegiance is to the Kingdom of God, and who therefore are never fully at home in any nation, party, or ideology. That doesn’t mean withdrawal from public life. It means engagement without captivity.

The way forward is not to swap one political savior for another. It is to recover our confidence that the church does not live by power, but by faithfulness. Not by fear, but by love. Not by grasping for control, but by bearing witness, sometimes costly witness, to a different kind of King.

Anything less is just another trip from the frying pan into the fire.

We live in a cultural moment that is deeply suspicious of limits. Limits feel like constraints to overcome, obstacles to eliminate, barriers to transcend. Whether through technology, politics, or personal identity, the modern imagination is captivated by the dream of limitlessness: more power, more control, more autonomy.

And yet, Stranger Things offers a different vision, not through moralizing tropes but through brilliant storytelling.

The Power of Interdependence

One of the most striking features of the show is that there is no singular hero. There is no lone savior figure who rises above everyone else to defeat evil through sheer strength or brilliance (you might argue that Eleven serves in that role, but not really- see my second point below). Instead, the story is carried by a web of relationships - friends, siblings, misfits - each deeply limited, each deeply wounded, and yet somehow, together, capable of resisting the darkness.

Nearly every central character bears some kind of wound -- trauma, grief, social marginalization, depression, addiction, or fractured families. And in the logic of the show, these wounds are not incidental. They are precisely what make the characters vulnerable to evil. Vecna does not target the strong and self-assured; he preys on those already carrying pain.

That’s what makes the now-iconic scene with Max so powerful (Season 4, Episode 4). Max is on the brink of being consumed, pulled into the void of her own trauma and guilt. She cannot save herself. She is not “strong enough.”

What breaks through the darkness is not her inner strength, but the voices of her friends. Their love. Their persistence. Their refusal to let her go. She is, quite literally, loved back to life.

And that is a deeply countercultural claim. Because it suggests that what ultimately overcomes evil is not the triumph of the strong, but the faithfulness of those who love us.

In a world obsessed with independence, Stranger Things offers a vision of interdependence— human beings bound together in love, where weakness is not a liability to be hidden but a reality to be honored and held by others.

Or to put it more simply:

We are not saved by being strong enough.
We are saved by being loved enough.

The Temptation of Limitless Power

Running alongside this theme is another: the dangerous allure of human beings who transcend their limits.

At the center of this is Eleven. From the beginning, she is the product of a system -- governmental, technological, quasi-scientific -- that is obsessed with power. Her abilities are cultivated, exploited, and weaponized in the pursuit of control.

If the first theme of the show is about shared weakness, this second theme is about concentrated power. And here the show becomes almost prophetic.Because what the “powers that be” want is not just protection from evil, but mastery over it. They seek control, dominance, and the ability to bend reality itself to human will.

(One can’t help but see parallels with our own moment: whether in the ambitions of big tech, the reach of the surveillance state, or the broader cultural belief that with enough innovation, we can overcome any human limitation.)

But again and again, the show subverts this vision. Eleven does not ultimately become a figure of domination. She does not embrace the full, limitless extension of her powers in the way others around her urge her to. Instead, she resists. She chooses restraint. She chooses relationship. She chooses, at key moments, not the assertion of power, but the surrender of it, even at great personal cost.

In doing so, she embodies a truth that runs counter to almost everything our culture tells us: The deepest reality of the universe is not power, but love.

And love, by its very nature, accepts limits. Love does not control. Love does not dominate.
Love does not seek to become limitless. Love binds itself to others in vulnerability and sacrifice.

The Spiritual Wisdom of Limits

In the Christian story, human beings are created perfect yet limited. We are made by God, like God, but ultimately we are distinct from God: dependent, finite, and limited. Our limits are not a flaw in the system; they are part of the design.

And yet, the primal temptation has always been the same: “You can be like God.” To transcend creatureliness, to escape dependence, to grasp for limitless power. It is the oldest lie in the book, and it is alive and well today.

But the gospel offers a radically different vision. In Jesus Christ we are given a God who becomes like us, who enters into and embraces the finitude and limitations of our humanity. In Jesus, God fully embraces a body that can suffer, relationships that can be wound, and life that can be taken. And it is precisely there – in his weakness, in dependence, and his capacity for sacrificial death – that evil is overcome.

Not through domination, but through sacrifice. Not through control, but through communion.

Living as Limited People in a Limitless Age

What might it look like to receive our limits not as enemies, but as gifts?

It might mean:

• embracing our need for others instead of striving for self-sufficiency

• allowing our wounds to become places of connection rather than shame

• resisting the cultural pressure to maximize power, productivity, and control at all costs

• choosing love over dominance in our relationships, our work, and our public life

In other words, it might mean becoming the kind of people we see, surprisingly, in a sci-fi show about monsters and alternate dimensions. We can be people who don’t try to save the world on our own. People who refuse to abandon one another. People who believe, however imperfectly, that love is stronger than evil.

In the end, Stranger Things is not just a story about fighting monsters. It is a story about what it means to be human.

And in a culture that is increasingly allergic to limits, this is a story that needs to be told.